We don’t need disaster movies and CGI to seeepic tragedy befalling the human race. It’s just harder to make a movie about, because we have seen the enemy and they is us.

I partied last night with 200 elephant friends in Boulder, at our Liquid Appreciation Society elephantjournal.com Holiday party, sponsored by organic, local Peak Spirits, held at foodie fanstasy Cafe Aion. I partied last night with, among many others, my former intern Lindsay, who now works for my colleague and friend Jeff Orlowski, the man behind Chasing Ice. And then, this morning, front page of Reddit:

Updated video: “A “calving” event is when a piece of ice breaks off a glacier. We’ve all seen that in the news, when a piece of ice falls into the water….that landscape is miles and miles and miles wide. This one is in HD and has scale references at the end of the clip.

The pieces of ice that broke off on that day spanned an area of 3 miles wide by 1 mile across, and 3,000 feet deep. It took a full 75 minutes for the ice to break into the ocean. It is the largest event that has ever been filmed, and we had 9 cameras there capturing the event. In the film it makes a lot more sense because there’s more context, and the big screen makes it easier to grasp the scale as well.” ~ Jeff Orlowski, director

It’s like watching ‘Manhattan breaking apart in front of your eyes’, says filmmaker James Balog. He’s describing the largest iceberg calving ever filmed, as featured in his movie, Chasing Ice. After weeks of waiting, the filmakers witnessed 7.4 cubic km of ice crashing off the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland. Chasing Ice, released in the UK on Friday, follows James Balog’s mission to document Arctic ice being melted by climate change.

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[…] glaciers as they sat, melted, sat some more, melted and then in remarkable, swift movements—broke off to join the sea. The time-lapse camera system was uniquely innovated for this project. Jeff began tagging along […]